I had no excuse for not attending DDDNorth this year, as it was held at Leeds University, a relatively short drive from home. Not that I'd be looking for an excuse - these free events are always superbly organised and provide a valuable opportunity to see sessions from a wide…

Earlier this week registration opened for this year's DDD North. This is one of my favourite conferences, so I excitedly shared the news across my social media accounts, prompting the following curious email from a local Recruitment Consultant: Subject: DDD for the layman? I recruit .Net developers and have done…

"We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals" -- Stonecutter's creed Consider for a moment, if you will, the humble Boolean. Taking only two possible values, it is the most basic of all the data types we programmers use, and its existence is fundamental to all the code…

As a lowly sellsword amongst the ensemble cast that make up the incestuous York/Leeds IT scene, I am not usually one to be influenced by the promise of titles and honours. Time was, long ago, in my first graduate job, that I yearned for a promotion from "Solution Developer…

My first printer was a Star LC-20 nine pin dot matrix that I received as a Christmas present when I was 15 years old. That's the kind of nerdy teenager I was, folks. All yuletide long our home rang out with the deafening noise made by those pins rapidly and…

I have been merrilly using NCrunch - an "automated concurrent testing tool for Visual Studio" - for almost three years now. I ponied up for a paid license when it made the transition from beta to RTM, and I recently shelled out again for an upgrade to version 2. Why…

Blogging Again Right then, let's give this blogging lark another shot, shall we? I've had some form of blog online since the summer of 1997 (back when they were called online journals or simply 'homepages'). For most of that time my web presence was a single unfocussed site containing posts…

Are you plagued by bad code smells? Troubled by slow-running database queries and ETL routines? In need of some scalable and maintainable enterprise integration solutions? Look no further! As luck would have it, legendary Leeds-based freelance software developer Ian F. Nelson is now available again for contract opportunities. Fresh from…

In the grand scheme of things, 'tis but a minor achievement, but I was quite chuffed with myself this evening when my Stack Overflow reputation finally reached the 10,000 mark: My girls made me a special "10K" cake to celebrate :-) Kudos to Jeff, Joel and the team for…

I've just been trying to download all my old credit card statements from the American Express website. That's the kind of exciting life I lead. I had hoped that this would be a fairly straightforward task, but every step of the process seemed designed to frustrate and annoy me, leading…